The new figures from Synergy Research Group also show that the first half of the year topped expenditure of $53 billion compared with the $31 billion the same period achieved in 2017. Capex for Q2 would have been the highest ever, were it not for google purchasing Manhattan’s Chelsea Market building in March, which gave the Q1 figures a $2.4 billion boost.
“Hyperscale capex is one of the clearest indicators of the growth in cloud computing, digital enterprise and online lifestyles,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. “Capex has reached levels that were previously unthinkable for these massive data center operators and it continues to climb. The largest of these hyperscale operators are building economic moats that smaller competitors have no chance of replicating. In cloud computing especially, the ability to fund hyperscale capex levels has become a competition killer.”
While the rankings may differ according to quarter, for the last ten quarters the top five group big spenders has always consisted of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Facebook, which combined accounts for 70% of the total hyperscale capex. The company also notes that capex level at three of the aforementioned big five, were at an all-time high in Q2.
Much of the hyperscale capex is being spent on building and expanding huge data centres, which have now grown in number to a total of 420. The research is based on analysis of the capex and data centre footprint of 20 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, including the largest operators in Infrastructure-as-as-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-as-Service (PaaS), Software-as-as-Service (SaaS), search, social networking and e-commerce.
Outside of the top five, other leading hyperscale spenders in Q2 included Alibaba, Baidu, IBM, JD.com, NTT, Oracle, SAP and Tencent.
